Memories of Elsewhere
by David Howard
If things tarnish allegory, 2021, digital photograph, Croatia.
As representations of elsewhere, photographs are also transitional objects. By capturing one determinate time in the external world, I hope to open an indeterminate time in the internal world of the viewer, who therefore comes to experience seeing as an act of faith.
Whether or not we believe God looks upon us, we are still required to look for ourselves. If a photograph is both an act of faith and a memory of the external world, I believe the memory many of us have as viewers is the memory of an absence. Each of these three photographs alerts us to the ineffable by reinforcing the viewer as voyeur, a voyeur whose knowledge (of separation) can be felt as a fall from grace. The truth of each photograph is not necessarily beauty, although in God the one becomes the other because, in God, subjectivity and objectivity are negated.
If this world is matriarchal, 2021, digital photograph, Croatia.
The trick of standing upright here, 2016, digital photograph, Castlerigg Stone Circle, N.W. England.
David Howard is the author of Rāwaho (Cold Hub Press, 2022) and the editor of A Place to Go on From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (Otago University Press, 2015). He held UNESCO City of Literature Residencies in Prague (2016) and in Ulyanovsk (2019).
